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Are graphics cards lying to gaming performance?

NVIDIA recently released the 4070 Ti, a graphics card which has the ability to hit the same numbers as the RTX 3090. The way to achieve this is through higher clock speeds, albeit with fewer cores. However, envy sells its graphics card as more powerful by the trick of interpolation in DLSS 3. Are we facing an exercise in trilerism by the company in green? Will his rivals also join him?

The most common way to measure the performance of a GPU is through the number of frames per second that it can achieve. What would happen if we told you that there is a way recently integrated into their RTX 40 cards out of envy so that these results can be cheated or partially falsified to give the impression that the real power of said hardware is much higher than it really is. They are

How does frame interpolation work?

Today we have to understand that when the processor has finished executing the screen list and it will be sent to the graphics card, it does not wait for it to finish to create it from the next frame, but it starts directly with it. To work the interpolation needs the position of the objects in the next one in the next frame so it becomes possible to generate a ghost frame, which is an exact copy of the next frame that would have to be rendered but made with less resources. In other words, elements such as shaders, post processing effects and so on are discarded as not being necessary.

NVIDIA Interpolation

To generate an intermediate frame between 2 Intermediate Frames between 2 existing Frames, it is necessary to take the position data in each one of them to be able to derive where they are in the intermediate frame. Today it is still the application of the derivative of the derivative of movement with respect to time, that is, speed, for which an image buffer is saved in which each object is identified and where it is located in each of the two frames. .

Knowing this information, it is possible to fill in the missing information in the intermediate frame to have a much more complete and credible version for our eyes. Although if we saw it in slow motion and with enough speed we would see that it has flaws. However, our brain fills in the missing gaps

Why is it a trap?

Companies like NVIDIA are using interpolation in their DLSS 3 to inflate the number of fans compared to the competition. They even do it to compare their new graphics cards to the old ones. Thanks to this, they achieve results that looking at the raw specifications would be impossible. We do not know at the moment if AMD is going to adopt the interpolation in FSR 3. What is clear is that in both cases it has to be adapted by the developers.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2

In theory and on paper, having more Frames per second is always good, however, things get worse if we talk about games that go below the base 60 FPS. The reason is that for the interpolation to be credible, the time of each frame must be quite short, so that our brain does not see the failures or does not have time to see them. So it is an ideal solution for games that already work at high frequency and you want to make the most of a monitor with G-SYNC, FreeSync or VRR support.

Actually, the only games with which it works well are those with update engines of 30 or 60 frames per second and that is why, although it seems paradoxical, all the promotion done with games such as: Valorant, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, Fortnite and other games is not adequate or realistic

It is disastrous for both VR and eSports

The problem is that it didn’t play well with competitive play and it didn’t play well with virtual reality either. Since the resulting extra frames are not the product of the player’s action at all times. As much as we play in VR with screens at more than 120 Hz, we will see that the response time between the action we do and what we see is almost immediate HP. On the other hand, if we hit that refresh rate with interpolation, that response won’t be immediate, breaking the immersion and destroying the reason why playing at these frame rates is good for games in both cases.

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